


Towards the Moon or to the Sun

by jetsam



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-30
Updated: 2013-04-02
Packaged: 2017-12-07 00:52:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/742184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jetsam/pseuds/jetsam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The threat of confessing naked seemed like a good idea to Riko at the time.  It is rather less of one when the season is over and they are all skulking in the changing rooms and not looking her in the eye.  Ch2, after the final defeat</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It seems like an inspired idea to start off with: the sort of motivator that no teenage boy would be able to resist. She fully intended to hold them to it too, and maybe something of that came across in the gleam in her eye when she informed them that if they lost, they would be confessing to a girl naked.

Less than a year later, she was cursing her own ingenuity. One season gone, one miserable loss, and they were all skulking in the changing rooms and not looking her in the eye. 

Well, not quite all. Tsuchida was fine. He had a girlfriend, and she was perfectly nice, and would probably laugh at him when he confessed and blush furiously and let him take her out for ice cream once he put his clothes back on.

The others, though.

She hadn’t fully appreciated exactly how focussed some of them were.

“They don’t look at girls,” Miho-chan said with a smile when she complained. “They spend all their time sitting talking about basketball. You’re the only girl they ever really talk to, and you only talk about basketball.”

Riko looked at her blankly and escaped to the gym to plan a particularly challenging training menu for the next time Hyuuga approached her seriously about when they should be fulfilling their promise.

Koganei was almost fine. He just looked confused. (That was a bit of a relief. Koganei always seemed like he was about twelve, and the thought of him dating was absolutely terrifying). Mitobe was just silent, and that was also fine because it was reassuringly normal.

It was the other three that were concerning her: Hyuuga and Kiyoshi and Izuki. They were the core of her team as well as the core of her problem. Not only were they not talking to her (Kiyoshi, at least, was in the hospital and didn’t have the chance to), but they had started looking hard at her outside of basketball practice.

* * *

“May I speak to you in private, Coach?” Izuki said as the others were leaving after practice.

“Eh?”

“Here’s fine,” he said, and smiled. She twitched. He was sitting there still in his basketball kit, though the others had quickly changed and gone.

She put a hand on her hip. “Well?”

“It’s… I have a girlfriend, Coach.”

“You what?”

“Have a girlfriend,” Izuki was looking over her shoulder at the firmly closed door. “It’s kind of a secret.”

Riko blinked. It was a secret, so he was telling her. There was something she was missing. “Do you need advice? You should talk to Miho-chan, really-“

“No, it’s about confessing, Coach. I’m not going to be able to soon. I can’t confess to anybody else.”

“No, of course not.”

“But my girlfriend lives in Sapporo. I won’t be seeing her until next summer.”

Izuki looked at his shoelaces and Riko sighed. That was almost tragic. Almost. It did mean that he wouldn’t have any distractions from basketball for a good few months. Still, she couldn’t let him off entirely…

“You can write her a letter,” she said desperately, when her mind turned to photographs. “A written declaration. With no puns.”

Izuki smiled at her. “Thank you, Coach.” He paused by the door, hand on the handle. “You won’t tell anyone, will you? It’s easier if people don’t know.”

Riko wasn’t about to ask what he was going on about now, so she nodded and watched him leave.

* * *

A week later, Hyuuga was still giving her strange looks at practice and Riko was getting more and more twitchy about it. She just wished he’d get on with it, whatever his problem was. She did wonder if he was sweet on the maths teacher – surely that was the only reason he could be that bad in her class – and confessing to her might cause problems for the club.

It bore thinking about.

Maybe she should forbid him from confessing.

She almost mentioned it to Kiyoshi when she went to visit him in hospital. Even though he had to be feeling guiltier than any of them at the loss, he smiled at her as she came in and perched on the chair by the bed. Someone had brought flowers and they were wilting in a vase on the bedside table.

She didn’t ask how he was doing. Not when he was trying so hard to smile for her (his real smiles were always lopsided, and made him look a bit surprised).

“Miho-chan says that Kaneda has a crush on Matoba,” she said instead, and gave him all the gossip. She sat down with Miho every week so that she could keep him up to date.

Kiyoshi was a good audience. He teased details out of her that she didn’t know she knew, but then Kiyoshi liked to know everything about everyone. It was almost at the end of the visit that she ran out of news for him, and the laughter faded a little from Kiyoshi’s eyes.

“So what has the idiot done this time?” he asked.

Riko shut her mouth quickly and pressed her lips together. She was not going there. Not when Kiyoshi was in his pyjamas in a hospital bed, and she was the only regular female visitor except for his grandmother. Not a chance.

Kiyoshi’s hand shot out to grab hers, and if she wasn’t so annoyed she’d be smug about how little speed he’s lost in captivity. “Come on, he’s an idiot but it can’t be that bad?”

“Hyuuga’s not talking to me again.”

“Ah,” Kiyoshi actually looked worried. “He’s not trying to quit again, is he?”

“No, not that.”

Riko wasn’t going to say what she though it was. Not a chance. Kiyoshi was studying her again, the same look he got on the court and taking things at least somewhat seriously. Then he laughed and dropped her hand to lean back, hands linked loosely behind his head.

“He’s not worrying about confessing, is he?”

Riko didn’t say anything, but she could feel the heat rushing to her cheeks.

“So short sighted,” he said, and shook his head. “I’m not confessing to anyone until after we lose for real. Next year is when we really need to get serious. No one wins Nationals with a team of first years. Not in high school. People can just keep guessing.”

It couldn’t be that simple, surely?

“Pick up the pace!” she shouted at practice the next morning. “Warm up’s over: next year you have to be ready to take on Nationals.”

Hyuuga started talking to her again that afternoon. Neither of them said anything about the short lapse in communication.

Kiyoshi did. They both hit him.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the last defeat.

Riko was sitting in the gallery above the sports hall where practice was going on. 

She was not strictly supposed to still be coming to the club, but she equally couldn’t quite trust their juniors to be running things unsupervised, so she sat there most evenings on the floor of the gallery where they couldn’t see her, a textbook open on the floor in front of her. So far there had been no disasters.

Retiring from the club was hard on all of them. Hyuuga had gone back to sitting the classroom after school finished, staring out of the window and doing very little of his homework, and Kiyoshi. Well, Kiyoshi’s retirement notice had appeared on the desk in the clubroom along with all of the others, even though he hadn’t been allowed to touch a basketball in months. She placed her own on the top of the pile, Hyuuga’s at the bottom and handed them to Kagami in a neat pile as she walked out of the clubroom for the last time.

She missed hearing Kiyoshi play. Seeing, yes, but the beat of his leisurely dribble was distinct in her ears and it had hurt to hear its absence in training all year.

“Kiyoshi-senpai, does Coach know you’re here?” Kagami asked. Riko stood up in the shadow of a pillar and looked down. Coach was still her, in their minds, and there was still a little thrill of glee when she heard it.

Kiyoshi, the _idiot_ was standing there, leaning on his crutches in his school uniform - small mercy that Hyuuga was hovering at his shoulder, not quite touching but more than close enough to grab him if necessary. She wasn’t sure the crutches were doing the floor any good, but it was Kiyoshi and maybe that was no longer her concern.

“One more promise to keep,” Kiyoshi said, and Riko could hear the fake smile in his voice. “I might need a hand, Hyuuga.”

It took a moment, but then Hyuuga was there with an arm around Kiyoshi’s waist, handing a crutch to a junior, while Kiyoshi was busy… unbuttoning his shirt?

Riko blushed, ducked further into the shadow of the pillar.

Then she looked back, curiosity getting the better of her. There’s only one promise that Kiyoshi could possibly mean, and there were, as far as he knew, no girls whatsoever in the sports hall.

She turned her back when Kiyoshi reached for his trousers. But she could hear when he was done.

“I… I really love basketball!” he shouted, just as he did that very first day on the roof, and the smile in his voice was genuine if bittersweet. She peered around (honestly, it was nothing that she hadn’t seen before at some point). Kiyoshi had his back to her, his face buried in Hyuuga’s shoulder. She didn’t think he was crying, though. Not quite. 

Riko wiped her face. She never did think of that way around her challenge.

She waited at the locked outside door til they came, and neither of them seemed too surprised to see her. Both of them were smiling.

“So, Hyuuga,” she said, because really they had let it go on long enough, and Kiyoshi laughed.

Hyuuga blushed.


End file.
